Day: July 27, 2011

[Hasith] sent in this project where he goes through the process of designing a one instruction CPU in Verilog. It may not win a contest for the coolest build on Hack A Day, but we really do appreciate the “applied nerd” aspect of this build.

With only one instruction, an OISC is a lot simpler than the mess we have to deal with today. There are a few instructions that by themselves are Turing-complete (like Subtract and branch if negative, and Move). Designing an OISC with one of these instructions means it can also emulate a Turing machine.

When looking for things to write about, there is nothing we like to see more than well-documented schematics and code available for download. In the case of schematics, we realize that they can be a bit of a pain to publish. Many times we see them in the form of blurry JPEGs or humungous PDF files, neither of which are incredibly convenient to use. The folks over at CircuitBee thought the same thing, and have been working diligently to make it easier for everyone to share their awesome ideas with the world.

Their free service requires registration, and not much else. Once you’re in, you are free to upload your Eagle or KiCAD circuit diagrams, which are then run through CircuitBee’s servers. They convert your drawings into embeddable objects which allow others to view your project without a lot of fuss. Their embeddable schematic window can be rendered in full screen mode, and gives users the ability to zoom in on any portion of the drawing to see the circuit’s finer details.

[Ben Delarre] from CircuitBee says that the product is in the alpha stages right now, so there are plenty of features and useful tools coming in the near future. If you like to build and share, it’s definitely something worth checking out!